Top 10 Posts of 2021

If 2020 was the strangest year in most of our lives to date, 2021 was more of the same: strange got stranger. Anyone who thinks he knows what’s coming in 2022 is probably wrong. Here at Coming Untrue, we are grateful to continue to experience the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit in our feeble attempts to serve a Master whose yoke is easy and whose burdens are light.

All the rest is detail — as we have had occasion to remind one another all year long — though that “detail” certainly makes a lot of din and clatter around us.

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“Which of the psalms stands out the most to you?”

If you were stranded on a desert island and could take only one book of the Bible with you, which book would it be? Forest Antemesaris says he would take the Psalms, and many Christians would agree with him. The Psalms, he says, are “the songbook of Israel, a chronicle of praise from our spiritual ancestors, an emotional catharsis, the New Testament’s Old Testament foundation, and the scriptural bedrock of spiritual formation”. He goes on to say the Psalms are central to both testaments, and foundational to praise, the biblical language of prayer, and the love of God’s word.

All this is true.

Christ and the Police State

The Rutherford Institute is a nonpartisan organization whose self-appointed mission is to hold the U.S. government accountable to abide by the rule of law, sound the alarm over institutional abuses of power, and educate Americans about reclaiming their constitutionally-guaranteed but steadily-eroding freedoms. Its founder John Whitehead is deeply concerned that America is becoming a police state, and he offers plenty of evidence to back up his claims.

All very important stuff in its own place, I’m sure, but what does it have to do with Christians? Well, Whitehead has written a Christmas post entitled “The Christmas Baby Born in a Police State: Then and Now”, in which he asks the question “What if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later?”

Okay, now I’m interested.

Mining the Minors: Hosea (8)

It’s easy to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

In our previous post, God anticipates Israel’s response to its discovery that its false gods cannot deliver it from the invading Assyrian army. Like an adulterous wife whose new relationship goes sour, the nation compares its current situation with better days in the past, and concludes, “I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now.”

Israel is finally prepared to do the right thing, but she has not actually repented of her idolatry. She is simply looking for the best deal she can swing for herself, a God who will take her back on her own terms.

Too Hot to Handle: Offenders for a Word

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Christianity Today’s Caleb Lindgren interviews author Brian J. Wright about his new book, Communal Reading in the Time of Jesus.

Tom: We bounced this article around by email last week, IC, and it was fodder for a few interesting observations. I thought we might revisit it here. One major weakness of Lindgren’s interview is that he never quite gets Brian Wright to define “communal reading” for us, and the term then ends up being used to describe a whole bunch of different things in the course of the interview.

Care to take a shot at defining it?

Who Reads Anymore?

I’ve heard that Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time may be the most famous book people have never read.

That’s right: Never.

People sure do talk about it. It’s sold ten million or so copies. Lots of people cite the title of the book, laud it, and claim to have found their opinions confirmed by it — but few of these have actually ever read it.

In a way, maybe that’s understandable. It is, after all, a fairly challenging book. For a mathematician, it’s a good read, perhaps; for the average person it’s a quick road to Slumberland. Even though it’s pretty short it only takes a few pages to render most folks unconscious.

My Contingent Ego (or A Matter of Pride)

You can’t discuss a matter effectively unless you really understand what the other side is saying.

Mischaracterizing the other position is extremely common in theological disagreements. I try very hard to avoid it here by quoting people directly, linking to context, and reading and contemplating an argument before I reply to it. I try even harder to avoid speculating about the motives of those with whom I disagree, since these are irrelevant to the truth or error of a person’s viewpoint.

But even these precautions cannot guarantee I have really heard and comprehended what the other side is trying to communicate.

Infinite and Infinitesimal

“And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel — and God knew.”

Here we have a series of what can only be called anthropomorphisms. Okay, I suppose technically we could call them “verbs ascribing human actions to that which is not human”, but let’s take six syllables over fifteen. The point is that the writer of Exodus is using language we understand to describe processes we can’t possibly comprehend.

Consider ...

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“How does one write effectively about Christianity in a work of fiction?”

The Christian faith has been a defining feature of my life so long that I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of it at some level, even if it was only that I didn’t like the pews in church because my feet couldn’t reach the floor, or that my parents didn’t approve when I got down and crawled between them during the service. My childhood reading was full of “Christian” literature, from the too-saccharine adventures of the Sugar Creek Gang to the memorable spiritual analogies of C.S. Lewis’s children’s books.

Later in life I developed a taste for detective fiction and sci-fi, and discovered that secular writers have their own reasons for depicting Christians and their faith in one light or another.

Division and the Preservation of the Bible

People often complain that Christians are divided. Denominationally, intellectually, interpretationally, geographically and/or racially divided. Some even take this as evidence the claims of Christ are untrue.

I take a little different tack on that subject. In 2014, I wrote about the reasons Christians are divided. In 2015, I even wrote about the good that occasionally results from these divisions.

If I keep coming back to the subject, it’s not because I want to repeat myself but because so many people see it as a major problem.

Peace Rules

December 24, 1914. Nightfall.

British, French and German troops are hunkered down at Flanders, fighting the latest “War To End All Wars”. Barbed wire. Bayonets. Machine guns. Gas. Trenches half full of fetid water, with walls composed of human bodies. Dysentery, decay, despair and death. Miserable troops on both sides of a sixty-yard space of devastated earth shiver in the clammy cold of winter, waiting for the order to scrabble over the top.

Merry Christmas.

Too Hot to Handle: A COVID Christmas

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more holiday-oriented than usual.

Tom: I was out for my early morning walk in a little bit of a mood, and I decided the thing to do was to spend my prayer time thanking the Lord for the good things he has brought into my life and the great things he is doing in this world.

I’m sure you can imagine exactly what happened, IC: my mood changed drastically.

Immanuel Can: Gratitude will do that, won’t it? One of the great sins of mankind is lack of it.

Mining the Minors: Hosea (7)

Mining the Minors and Immanuel Can’s usual Thursday post have swapped spots this week. I’m sure you can guess why.

As I noted in the fifth instalment in this series, the latter verses of Hosea 2 — in my English translation at least — divide nicely into three sections, each of which conveniently begins with the word “therefore”. These divisions are not completely arbitrary. They reflect three movements in God’s program for idolatrous Israel, a program to which Israel must respond either positively or negatively. I also noted that the English translators of the ESV signal the intentionality of these movements with the words “I will”.

The first movement in verses 6-8 gives us two of God’s “I wills” and one of Israel’s.

Things Hidden in Darkness

Reuben was Jacob’s firstborn. He was named by his mother in hope that his existence in the world would be a turning point in her relationship with her husband, who had eyes only for her more-attractive sister. But now that Leah had given Jacob a son, perhaps finally she would be loved.

As one might anticipate, that optimistic gesture turned out to be futile. Leah’s hopes were dashed.

Did young Reuben resent the way his father treated his mother? Come on, a firstborn son? We feel responsible for everything that happens to everybody. That’s just the dynamics of birth order. It would have been impossible for him to grow up unaware of the ever-present tension between his mother and her sister, or of the lack of interest his father displayed in Leah. No, Reuben was right in the middle of all the family intrigue.

Why Not Now?

We live in an age of instant gratification.

If I want a superior coffee experience, I have only to walk to the corner, or drive to my friend Rod’s house. If I want to know what’s happening across the world, five minutes with CNN will probably do it. If I want to feign expert knowledge of virtually any subject, half an hour of Googling enables me to pass myself off as conversant with all but the genuinely knowledgeable.

God doesn’t operate that way. It’s a bit vexing at times, I must admit.

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“What specific verse/passage about human nature resonates the most with your observations?”

That’s a tough one to pin down. Whichever passage I choose today, I’m almost guaranteed to find an even better one tomorrow.

Would you settle for a top five?

The Heiser Bolt of Lightning

A couple of weeks ago I promised to devote an entire blog post to the bolt of lightning that hit my synapses when I read a single, throwaway paragraph in Michael S. Heiser’s The Unseen Realm. It was a delightful experience to find that the scriptures account for the cognitive dissonance I and other Bible students experience when we compare many prophecies in their original Old Testament contexts to their fulfillments as described by the writers of the New Testament.

A familiar example of such a “Whuzzat?” moment: Matthew’s use of the words “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

Mining the Minors: Hosea (6)

When Canada rejected Stephen Harper as Prime Minister in favor of a candidate whose most identifiable features were his last name and haircut, I was completely unsurprised.

At the time I often lunched in a semi-trendy midtown café frequented by liberal-leaning twenty-somethings. It’s a small place; even if you are not inclined to eavesdrop, the tables are wedged in so tightly that you can hardly fail to pick up the broad strokes of any animated conversation in the room. Back in 2015, day after day, patron after patron, the subject was politics and nothing but. Young Canadian urbanites hungered for an abrupt swing to the left, and they were determined to make it happen.

And so they did. The country has yet to recover.

Too Hot to Handle: Where There is No Vision ...

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Kevin Miller is an Executive VP at Christianity Today International. In this article he lays out a number of ways that one can go about developing a vision.

Tom: Immanuel Can, Miller is ignoring the elephant in the room: he starts with the unstudied assertion that good leaders must always be men of vision and charges right into how we can all acquire it without addressing why this quality is allegedly a critical component of leadership.

And he’s not alone.

Immanuel Can: You’re right, Tom, there are a lot of people talking about our lack of vision as Christians today. What do you think accounts for this widespread concern, and how legit do you think it is?

Lies, Myths and Misinformation: Christianity Causes Wars

The application of the statement “religion causes wars” to Christianity is actually a double lie.

It’s a lie because its detractors classify Christianity as a “religion” just the same as any other. You be the judge of whether or not that’s fair. But let’s give them that one for the sake of argument.

It’s also a lie because it’s not even accurate to say that the disparate group of things secular people call “religion” causes wars. It’s not just intuitively wrong, it’s statistically absurd.